East gate lodge & entrance gates, Ballywalter Park, 15 Springvale Road, Springvale, Ballywalter, Newtownards, Co. Down, BT22 2PE

Single storey Italianate gate lodge and matching gate screen of c.1850 by Charles Lanyon at the main (east) entrance to Ballywalter Park. There is a large 1990s flat roofed extension to rear of the lodge. The screen and lodge are set on the west side of Springvale Road, roughly half a mile south of Ballywalter, with a similar but plainer gate screen on the opposite side of the road. In 1967 Alistair Rowan described this lodge as; ‘A perfectly symmetrical suave building on a cruciform plan in fawn-coloured sandstone and stucco. Dominating is the three semicircular-arched [S facing] “porte-cochere”, with archivolts springing from square piers to scrolled keystones. In the gable over a roundel with the Mulholland crest, an escallop gules. The sides of the porch have shouldered arches and pretty pierced balustrades. There are paired scrolled brackets to eaves, repeated as purlin ends to gables. To the side elevations are tall semicircular headed windows with margined glazing set into recesses. Flanking are smaller subsidiary lights in Venetian vein. Uniting the composition a moulded stringcourse at arch springing level. At the junction of ridges is a big square panelled chimney stack with bracketed cornice’. Since then a large flat roofed extension has been added to the NE corner with two smallish windows (much in the style of original windows) and a timber and glazed rear door. A tall ward enclosing a yard at the SE corner, built presumably at the same time as the extension, has been demolished recently. Entrance gates A few yards to the E of this gate lodge are the main entrance gates. These were described by Rowan in 1967 as ‘impressive’ with ‘extensive walled quadrants...contained by big stone pillars. These frame iron railings containing wicket gates which flank the big carriage gates in matching robust and decorative [‘spear head’] cast iron. Each sandstone pillar is built up with deeply rusticated panelled blocks off a carved plinth. A plain frieze is surmounted by a moulded capping. Pretty scrolled volutes to the gate stops’. Since then little has changed, though there appears to have been only ever one wicket gate rather than ‘wicket gates’. Part of the quadrant wall to the N side collapsed recently after being hit by a car, but the stone from the wall has been saved and the damaged portion will be reconstructed soon. On the other side of the Springvale Road, directly opposite this entrance, is another gate screen with much more simple, understated, pillars, but containing similar ‘spear head’ gates. The pillars are flanked by railings on a low wall.